Everyone I have spoken with about fibromyalgia has a different account of how their fibromyalgia symptoms first began. Most people can trace their first symptoms back to some sort of trauma or illness. In my case, I became ill immediately after the birth of my first child. Here is the story of how fibromyalgia began for me.
I was married to my high school sweet heart a couple of weeks after graduation. Three months later I became pregnant with our first child. Although I had been sickly as a child, I began feeling very energetic in high school and rarely became ill, except during allergy season. The first three months of my pregnancy I was tired a lot, however by my fourth month I began to experience a healthy feeling I had never felt before. I felt terrific! I gained a significant amount of weight during my pregnancy and during my eighth month began to experience some of the symptoms of toxemia. By the time I went into labor on July 2, 1989 I had full blown toxemia. I labored for sixteen hours and finally had a beautiful baby boy. He was healthy, although he had jaundice. I, on the other hand, was not well after the birth. I had spinal fluid leaking from the site where my saddle block had been given. I ended up going back a week later and having a procedure to clot the opening. After the procedure, my intense illness subsided, however, I continued to feel weak, fatigued, depressed, and have pain throughout my entire body. I just didn’t feel well enough to go out and do things. At the time, my child was not sleeping at night so I chalked it up to sleep deprivation.
Eventually my child became a toddler and my normal state of health still had not returned. My child became a preschooler and still I was tired all the time and having one infection after the other. I had a second and a third child, those children became toddlers and preschoolers and then kindergartners and still I was drop dead tired all of the time and sick most of the time. Until one day I looked around and my first baby was turning eighteen, my second baby was in high school, my youngest baby was entering middle school, I had been divorced and remarried for five years, I had been through an embarrassing amount of jobs and still every day I was drop dead tired. Except now I had serious cognition and memory problems and wide spread horrible pain in my body.
I had a baby eighteen years ago and never recovered. My life went on, events happened, things changed. But one thing did not change...I am still sick and tired.
